Snow Day

Three pills into my day, three inches of snow,

My driveway beckons, as it has so often before.

At my age this is what passes for duty, this is

One of the tasks I have left, the others left me

Or I left them, so here I am tending to my to-do

List, a list I keep privately in my head to keep

Me on track, so I don’t look out later and ask

Why the snow seems so deep, untouched, just

There, still waiting. This may be the winter of our

Discontent, pandemic deep into ourselves, dead

Piling up, cases more than ankle deep and drifting

Away from us. My day, the snow, my driveway,

My sense of self become trivial, now not even 

A footnote or a smudged comment written in

The margins of today, but here I am again filling

The page, since it too is one of the tasks I have left.

Sunday

It’s Sunday, I can tell, I get up the same time as always

but on Sundays, like this, the neighbors’ cars are in their

driveways, where I left them last night, some must still be

sleeping, the scene out front is quiet enough to imagine

it as a portrait of quiet, a portrait I’m painting in my head

with words and colors, peaceful, almost motionless, calm.

On the seventh day god rested, right, and so the demi-gods

amongst us take their turn at it. Now there is no flooring to

sell, no patients to attend to, no restless class of children to

teach, no more universes to create, so they rest, sleep in,

while I stand here looking out trying to catch what I can of

the tranquility of Sunday, the day of rest that time lends us,

leaves us here to make the best of it, like this.

Blind

What? A walk, of course

It fits the day, snowless cold

And the dog is along

He’s blind now

So we follow his nose

Or his memory

He knows the way

Better than we do

We’ve put the holidays

Where they belong

Behind us

Memories now, almost sightless

We know our way away

From now – into what?

A walk, covid slow, still a walk

Into a future we guess at

You say summer, maybe spring

Our walk goes on and on

Years end like this

Not with a bang but a whimper

The blind walking into

Whatever futures hold

For them.

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J. K. Durick is a retired writing teacher and online writing tutor. His recent poems have appeared in Literary Yard, Black Coffee Review, New Feathers Anthology, Synchronized Chaos, Madswirl, and Highland Park Poetry.